1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to mobile devices. More specifically, the present invention relates to mobile devices having plurality of virtual interfaces.
2. Background of the Invention
Mobile devices are proliferating across the market. End users are dealing with the complexity of bridging their work life and personal life. These users are dealing with information overload, and are being subject to too many calls, messages, and emails. They have to balance their personal contacts and their business contacts, their personal email and business email, their personal calendar and their business calendar, and different security needs of business applications and consumer applications.
Notably, an increasingly common trend is for users to carry multiple devices for different purposes. A corporation might issue enterprise devices to their employees, for instance, a Blackberry®. Since certain features on the issued Blackberry® may be locked, users may also maintain personal devices to store personal contacts, download music and videos, and execute applications. However, maintaining separate devices is cumbersome. Not only does the user incur hassles such as separate billing and maintenance for each device, the user also has two separate phone numbers, which is redundant considering that the same person answers both phones.
Some users have resorted to using multiple network interfaces, such as Subscriber Identity Module (SIM) cards, on a single device. This is not an ideal solution as physical actions need to be taken in order to swap the SIM card for different purposes. Also, this solution is not feasible for receiving calls from different types of contacts—only one “phone” is active at one time. Also, the user still has to deal with multiple addresses or phone numbers, one for each SIM card.
Virtualization is becoming increasingly popular on computers these days. A computer can run several instances of the same or different operating systems by providing each instance with a “virtual machine,” or a virtual set of hardware resources mediated by an underlying software layer. However, virtualization on mobile devices is not widely practiced or fully understood.
What is needed is a simple and effective way to provide call processing for different contexts for a single user without having to deal with multiple devices.